June 11, 2002	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 29, 1423

LONDON: There is an eerie symmetry. One world crisis, anxiously tended by the United States, takes a breather. India and Pakistan will not blow each other up this week. Another world crisis duly resumes centre stage as Ariel Sharon heads for the White House, doubtless fearing the propaganda moment — probably as he and Bush embrace in the rose garden — when some faraway survivor of Jenin takes his final revenge. One step closer to the brink, one step back.

Is there any hope on offer, any light at the end of this interminable maze of diplomatic tunnels? No. Of course not. Washington and Tel Aviv aren’t going to row the Palestinians in general, or Yasser Arafat in particular, back into the act. Hosni Mubarak came to plead and went away with nothing.

The ubiquitous assumption is that nothing useful in such continual crises can grow from the ground up, that everything has to be handed down by the “world community” in its mid-Texan manifestation. Two years ago, candidate Bush promised the very reverse of such engagement. He was bent on sticking his nose out of other people’s business. He had things at home to sort out first, like taking an axe to the supposedly stifling bureaucracy that eight years of Clinton had left behind.

It is salutory — not to say chastening — to wonder what happened to all of that, to pause in awe over the fallout from Sept 11. Less bureaucracy? Here comes the brand new department of homeland security, sitting atop the CIA, FBI and NSA, another layer of furrowed-brows sweating over billions of dollars worth of hot computers in the fond belief that bigger government works best. Less engagement? The US has rarely set so many state department luminaries scurrying round the globe. The president has rarely had to get his tongue round so many far-off place-names.

But does he ever pause and wonder whether he wasn’t right the first time round? This isn’t an easy question to ask. The months, since the twin towers imploded, have been devoted to endless lectures about international responsibility and interdependence, so that all thought of individual responsibility has gone out of the window. Fair enough if you’re talking interdependent things like Kyoto, but not much use in the Hindu Kush.

Almost all western comment on this Kashmir bout — from Bush on down — has blended withering liberalism and closet racism. It has been taken as read that India and Pakistan, with 1.2 billion people between them and nuclear bombs at the ready on both sides, are too stupid and ill led to make the obvious deductions for themselves. That, putting it crudely, they can’t think straight in the third world.

Let’s turn that on its head. Both countries, from where they sit, have been acting perfectly rationally so far. The whole historic weight and clout of Pakistan’s armed forces, the reasons why military men like Musharraf keep bobbing up, depends on continued confrontation with the hated neighbour. No transient general has the outward power or inward inclination to disturb that convenient balance. Gen Musharraf may have chosen America since Sept 11, but that doesn’t mean he chose — or could choose — the whole package.

India, equally, is running along wholly predictable, grooved tracks. A coalition government facing an electoral drubbing? Pass the patriotic drum kit. More Kashmir militancy which, with an Al Qaeda flourish, can be tied into the twin towers. An absolute insistence that there can be no bargaining, and certainly no “deal” over the future of Kashmir for fear of encouraging other separatists and seeing the federation unravel.

These aren’t policy positions you need to agree with. You may, for instance, see a far better future for Kashmir as an independent tourist haven tucked away in prosperity. But disagreement is not irrationality. (In theory, I despise America’s failure to make peace with Fidel Castro. In Miami electoral practice, I know precisely why the Republicans shrink from doing it.) The fundamental question isn’t whether the policies are pristine, but whether they are artfully propounded.

Score one for Vajpayee this week. He’s hung tough and forced Musharraf to back away. He has internationalized the crisis on his own terms. But war, nuclear war, and the tens of thousands of westerners streaming home from India? That was always potty panicking. Why should we assume that India’s high command, not to mention Pakistan’s intensely professional military leadership, is so muddled and foolish that it thinks it can risk 10 or 20 million souls out of that 1.2 billion in some exchange of missiles? Why should we suppose that India would want to conquer 150 million Pakistanis when it can’t cope with three or four thousand of them on its own territory?

The “world community,” with its flying diplomacy, isn’t bringing peace — merely adding a fresh dimension to the game and condescendingly distracting attention from the brute fact that, at root, it is India and Pakistan who have spent the last half-century failing to come to terms. Their game, not ours. We can contribute nothing meaningful to it unless we can persuade New Delhi to cede Kashmir hegemony or Pakistan to forget history. Don’t hold your breath. These are big boys with big toys. If they’re big enough to have nuclear buttons, they’re also big enough to make their own calculations.

And (bleakly, too) isn’t that also the case in the Middle East? Sharon is not going to set any timetable for a Palestinian state. Bush, looking over his shoulder at the lobbyists massed behind, is not going to make him. There is no present process and there can be none until blood and exhaustion on the ground bring one.

Do the Palestinians realize that? Do they see a different road to travel? The one thing they should see, alas, is that outside intervention has brought them nothing. One step back, and then another.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.